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By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

Louise Erdrich

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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Way
Survive
Ways
Live
Writing

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

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You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.
Louise Erdrich
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Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
Louise Erdrich
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Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.
Louise Erdrich
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I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names.
Louise Erdrich
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I don't pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don't get me down.
Louise Erdrich
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To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.
Louise Erdrich
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In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.
Louise Erdrich
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Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
Louise Erdrich
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Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.
Louise Erdrich
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Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they'll leave you, sure. There's no return to what was and no way back. There's just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting.
Louise Erdrich
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You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
Louise Erdrich
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They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were they all fused into a single stubbornness.
Louise Erdrich
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Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.
Louise Erdrich
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Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
Louise Erdrich
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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
Louise Erdrich
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I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
Louise Erdrich
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I might not be able to use the word hope, but I could certainly use the word optimism. I'm very optimistic. I don't feel that it helps to be pessimistic. At some point in my life I made a conscious decision that I would try to be optimistic - not blind to anything at all - but to always hear the way that had the best chance for happiness.
Louise Erdrich
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When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
Louise Erdrich
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We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.
Louise Erdrich
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Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.
Louise Erdrich